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Twenty Five Seven (2018), They Are Here, custom made digital clock. Image courtesy the artists.

‘Get a puppy, puppies are fucking cute,’ the man says, shifting in front of a microphone. He is improvising advice for dealing with anxiety. The next person offers reasons not to move to California and simply states: ‘Americans. And that I work all day.’ Her last comment drives it home a bit, given that the people goofing and joking here are a mixed bunch of freelancers and migrants who have responded to a call-out, from groups like the Independent Workers’ Union, the Latin American Rights Service and Migrants Organise, for people to take part in a series of free comedy workshops. You could make an easy parallel of the making-it-up-as-you-go-along amid the endless uncertainty of life approach with the do-or-die pressures of the comedy stage: timing is everything, and, generally, it is not within your control. But it might be a way to channel the nervous energy and claim some form of agency back with laughter. The workshop is building up towards ROUTINE, 2018, when this group will present several stand-up comedy evenings as part of ‘Laughing Matter’, the collective practice They Are Here’s current exhibition at Studio Voltaire. Alongside the comedy nights, the exhibition holds a series of motion-triggered laugh tracks and over 50 borrowed ‘welcome’ mats. Laughter Track, 2018, turns the sitcom convention into a politicised group portrait, with the recorded laughs of, for example, people dealing with depression or asylum seekers; WELCOME, 2018, in turn, was sparked from an episode of the Simpsons, where Homer decided to try his hand at contemporary art: ‘steal all the doormats in town!’ Continue reading →

Strewn about the hallway is a trail of debris; lights, brooms, boxes, and other obstacles in a semi-organised sprawl. It’s like someone tried making a shop out of the bits in their attic, sifting through the junk, arranging it into small, improvised displays. The skeleton of a mostly empty postcard stand is propped in one corner, while a clear container with the inevitable, unsolvable tangle of electric wires sits in another. Propped up on one stand is a brown and grey photograph; what looks like a scuffed-up, dirty floor, with a hand truck and some rubbish scattered around. A metal grille runs across the image, with a thick, dull, chocolate-coloured sludge underneath it. Behind the propped-up photo is an odd set-up, with a work light dangling from a sideways soap dispenser – even more improbably, with a pair of sunglasses you can make out held inside. A text installed just beneath gives a winding explanation: ‘at the mechanics…hovering over the body wash pit out came the camera and almost at the same moment as taking the shot the sunglasses disappeared into the pit’. Pulling back, the quarantined sunglasses might now make more sense, displayed in a sort of makeshift mini-version of the car workshop. But then the photo itself, you can’t help but look again and try to stare into the impenetrable depths of whatever forsaken globs of mank had gathered in that drain over the years. Continue reading →